Hello everyone,
It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that C. Scott Ananian[1] has joined the Wikimedia Foundation as a Features Engineer.
Before joining us, Scott was Director of New Technologies at One Laptop per Child where he, among other things, worked on Nell, a platform to allow unsupervised learning of early literacy skills on tablets used in places like Ethiopia[2], and the OLPC security mechanism to prevent kids’ laptops from being stolen in transit. In between stints at OLPC, he worked as the Senior Architect at litl, LLC[3]. Clearly he has a thing for highly mobile PCs and applications (don’t tell Tomasz, he already stole Kaldari from Features :-P).
He started volunteering work on the MediaWiki parser project (Parsoid) on February 12th and got his first patch merged on February 15th. He’s had over 150 patches merged since then so it made sense that we should probably hire him ;-)
As you probably guessed with my usual tardiness, his first official day was actually Monday, July 8. He is going to continue his work on the Parsoid team with Gabriel Wicke and Subbu Sastry. He is super-motivated and has been mission-aligned since before Wikipedia existed[4], so I expect you’ll see him range far from our text infrastructure work. When he was at OLPC he liked to say his job was to “build robust and reliable systems to allow kids to discover, share, and learn.”
Scott lives and works in Cambridge, MA[5]. He is a square dancer[6] and theatrical lighting designer. I have it on good word that he’s a demon on MIT Mystery Hunt [7]—not sure if he’s on the same team as our Board Members or not [8], but if not…
Please join me in welcoming C. Scott to the Wikimedia Foundation. :-)
Take care, Terry
[1]: [[User:Cananian]] [2]: http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian_kids.php [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litl [4]: http://www.salon.com/2000/02/09/linuxdvd/ [5]: tewwy: interested in relocating? :-) cscott: no, sorry. cscott: wife, kid, and house like where they are. ;-) [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_square_dance ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Squares [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Mystery_Hunt [8]: [[User:Sj]] did, in fact, recruit him to the Codex team in 2009. Codex won in 2011.
terry chay 최태리 Director of Features Engineering Wikimedia Foundation “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.”
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